Wikimedia adds Google Translate to its Wikipedia translation tool

Wikimedia promises that no personal data will be shared with Google

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that it has added Google Translate to its translation tool, which will let human editors add non-English content to Wikipedia pages.

According to Wikimedia, this has been an issue that volunteer editors had previously noted.

The foundation notes that Google Translate is “one of the most advanced machine translation systems available today.”

According to VentureBeat, this is part of an earlier partnership where Google promised that it would help Wikipedia make its English posts more accessible to Indonesian readers. Additionally, the Mountain View search giant has previously donated to Wikimedia.

“No personal data will be shared with Google or Wikimedia as part of Google Translate’s integration into the content translation tool,” according to a January 9th, 2019 Wikimedia press release.

Wikimedia added that all of the translations it generates will be published under a free license and then integrated back to Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia translation tool will now support 15 more languages, with 121 languages in total. Wikimedia says that its translation tool has already translated nearly 400,000 articles on Wikipedia.